1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus and method.
2. Description of the Related Art
One printing system includes a plurality of printing units and determines to which printing unit(s) each page of Page Description Language (PDL) data should be allocated by the function of each printing unit. By the above-described printing system, distributed processing of the PDL data is realized.
One image forming apparatus includes a plurality of raster image processors (RIPs), divides data into pieces on a page by page basis, and allocates any one of the pieces of data to any one of the RIPs.
Recently, high speed image processing has been realized by performing pipeline processing using circuits that are installed in an image forming apparatus and performs a plurality of different kinds of image processing (for example, such as image rotation processing and image enlargement/reduction processing). In the case that a plurality of circuits perform different kinds of image processing, only some portions of the circuits are used depending on the type of a job to be executed. In the above-described image forming apparatus, some circuit portions are not used, and hence the utilization factor of the plurality of circuits is reduced.
In the case that a plurality of circuits such as the RIPs are installed for performing one kind of image processing in an image forming apparatus, the utilization factor may be increased by dividing data into pieces. However, in the case that a plurality of circuits are installed for performing different kinds of image processing, the utilization factor will not be increased even if data is divided into pieces.
In addition, by the above-described printing system, each page of PDL data is allocated by the function of the printing unit, so that the utilization factor may be slightly increased. However, even if this technique is applied to a plurality of image forming apparatuses, each having a plurality of circuits for performing different kinds of image processing, such a problem will occur that some circuits are unused in each of the image forming apparatuses depending on the type of the page allocated.